What Do You Make of a Diocese Closed to Considering Professing Diocesan Hermits?

[[Dear Sister, I wrote to you many many months back, and we exchanged some emails. I hope you are well, and given the pandemic, I doubly hope you are well. I thought this right up your alley. I saw on one diocesan website that states, ¨We have no diocesan hermits, and we are not opening to accepting any.¨ How very strange, given that the eremitic life has been present throughout the life of the church. Why do you suppose the eremitic life is so suspect? Sure, in a land with so many people, and indeed so many single people, there must be good hermits among us. What gives?]]

Hi there, and thanks for your concern and for the question. All is well here, though there are some ways I have not been able to get together with people and that really is a source of strain. I apologize that I do not recognize your email address. Perhaps you could jog my memory some re what we have discussed in the past; that would be helpful to me.

Yes, I think I know the diocese you are speaking of. They have a good understanding of the diocesan eremitic vocation and I can say that because I know who contributed to and wrote their material on this vocation. I have never asked why they decided to take this tack --- they were once open to hermits under c 603, so this is a shift for them. However, let me say that given their sound understanding of the vocation, this may not and need not be a matter of the eremitic life itself being suspect. It may be that the diocese has not found anyone willing or able to commit to accompanying a candidate for profession through the sometimes-lengthy discernment process required. It may be that no one feels they understand the life well enough to do this. This can happen precisely because they DO value the vocation and realize the degree of commitment it takes on the part of chancery personnel working with a single individual.

Similarly, it could be that they have received a considerable number of inquiries and petitions to be admitted to vows under canon 603 and found none of these were really hermits nor interested in becoming hermits. (Here is one place the distinction between being a lone individual and being a hermit is critically important. It is also a reason some dioceses have run into problems after they have admitted persons to profession.) I know that in my own diocese I was told they received on average, one request per month by persons seeking to become diocesan hermits even in the years since my own perpetual profession (this was around the time the person I was speaking to assumed office of Vicar for Religious). This was about five or six years ago and that meant the diocese had dealt with 8-10 years of at least a dozen petitions or inquiries per year and "none of these had gotten as far as (I myself) had". 

It needs always to be remembered the vocation is a rare one. (This emphatically does not mean it is either more or less valuable than other vocations, but it is rarer than they are nonetheless.) Moreover, eremitical solitude differs from other forms of solitude; the reason and way a person lives their own aloneness differs completely from many of these while sharing external similarities. This is ordinarily not appreciated by many whose imaginations are captured  by canon 603 --- and sometimes it is not sufficiently appreciated by the chanceries discerning a vocation with them. Consequently, the number of individuals who approach a diocese completely unready to enter into, much less to journey through a serious discernment and formation process eventuating in perpetual profession because they are not yet  hermits in any essential way seems to be considerable. Of these, a majority are not even contemplatives yet. Many would like to become Religious living without benefit or the obligations of community and also without literally embracing a desert spirituality and becoming a hermit --- a lot like the Episcopal (Anglican) canon allows for, but the Roman Catholic canon 603 is specifically eremitical and does not envision a generic religious life lived alone,

Yes, you are right that there are a lot of single people out there, but that is not the question. There are also a lot of people out there who would like to be Religious, but that is not the question either. Both of these facts can complicate or obscure the real question, which is, how many of these have experienced a divine call to live as a hermit and have taken the initiative and responsively shaped their life in that precise way before ever contacting a diocese --- or even if their diocese shows unwillingness to profess diocesan hermits? I think this is a critical part of discerning such a vocation and the question that must not be missed. 

Recently I have met a number of people who like to consider themselves hermits or aspiring hermits. Of these relatively few people, only 1 or 2 seem(s) to have actually become hermits in some essential sense and of these neither has demonstrated (to me anyway), that they actually have taken time to distinguish between being a lone individual and a hermit, secured a regular spiritual director, worked at personal formation in eremitical life/spirituality, or reflected significantly on the hermit's relation to the whole church. They tend to define freedom in terms of license and be about individuality rather than solitary eremitism. In other wards, this is a select community of self-described hermits and aspirants with only a couple actually taking the steps a diocese would need to see in order to accept and advance their candidacy toward profession.

All of that said, I do believe it is wrong for a diocese to simply close themselves in a blanket way to ALL individuals seeking to discern such a vocation with the Church. There will be few genuine vocations, yes, but the universal Church has determined this vocation exists and there are authentic hermits whose lives argue for the vitality and significance of this vocation. All dioceses should at least be open to the fact that there may be one or two people in the local church who might well be determined to have an suthentic eremitical vocation. In the case you described the diocese is actually giving people reason to do something which is not a good idea, namely, to diocese shop for a bishop/diocese who will profess them. More importantly, they show themselves apparently closed to the working of the Holy Spirit in the local Church.

At the same time I do believe that a single really good candidate, one who has become a hermit on her own initiative under spiritual direction, and come to understand the importance of ecclesial vocations to eremitic life might well change this diocese's mind on the matter. It would take some perseverance on the part of the candidate and some willingness to listen on the part of the diocese, but it is possible for an authentic hermit to change a diocese's mind -- at least in terms of opening themselves to actual discernment processes. Since this implies opening themselves to other possible candidates, they might then need to set some guidelines on the basis of such a vocation --- guidelines about what they expect in a candidate who wishes to discern an ecclesial vocation with the chancery staff, for instance. That would be entirely reasonable and allow them to winnow out those who have not even begun the process of becoming and living as a hermit in the lay state. There are also enough dioceses and some diocesan hermits now who can assist in working out a process (not a program!) of formation, etc. which is responsible but not onerous. Given all of this, simply closing to the possibility of using canon 603 generally seems particularly unreasonable to me.